February 6: Voodoo Ballerina King Cake Soiree
March 19 and 20: Decade at a Glance
February 6, 2010
Michalopoulos Studio
Entertainment includes:
Gov't Majik
Eggyolk Jubilee
The White Bitch
AND YOU!
Work out your wild self!
OPEN BAR provided by Old New Orleans Rum and Abita Beer
$20 donation
($25 donation at the door).
We're giving all the loot to Artist Inc.
to support locally produced art and performance.
To donate :
YOU MUST BE FULLY COSTUMED
OR YOU WILL NOT BE ALLOWED INTO THE PARTY!!!
*Accessories such as a funny hat, mask or wings is NOT a costume.*
*If you can wear it as normal street clothes it is not a costume.*
The recipients of this award are either a non profit organization, a service oriented group or individual artist who are recognized for their continued and persistent courage, spirit of contribution to the community and their commitment to expression. These recipients set a positive example for others to take risks and to engage fully in the opportunity that life is. They understand the basic truth: doing good makes for our greatest fulfillment, personally and within the community. We recognize them for living at risk, taking chances with their art, work and personal expression and we encourage them to go further out on that limb!
The Pirouette recipients will receive a donation from the Voodoo Ballerina King Cake Soiree, 3 bottles of Old New Orleans Rum and a gift.
The awards go to:
REX DINGLER / NOLA RISING
NoLA Rising began after Hurricane Katrina as a public art initiative to improve the day to day lives of the people living in New Orleans. Believing that "Art Can Heal the Wounded Soul", Michael "Rex" Dingler spread the message that while we, as New Orleanians, were down, we certainly weren't out. Through custom posters, random quotes and hand painted street signs, NoLA Rising became a cultural movement for social justice proving the power of a positive message. http://nolarising.org/history.
JERRY EDGAR
New Orleans socialite, great positive spirit, always doing things for the community and for artists, a gifted photographer and partner owner of Cafe Degas.
SCOTT HERON
Dancer, performing artist immersed himself in the NYC performance art scenes in the 1980's in spaces like P.S. 122, Dixon Place and others. He presented works with numerous ground breaking companies and performing artists. In the 1990's he settled into an art and performance commune in Tennessee where he continued to develop works to perform in NYC. Now in New Orleans since 2005 he performs with local dance troupes and individually, teaches circus arts and runs the Sidearm Gallery and Theater that he opened adjoining to his home on St. Roch Ave. http://scottheron.org/sh_bio.
ROBBIE JOY
Creative visual artist, decorator, glitters 60 pairs of shoes for MUSES, including royalty ( w/o compensation!). Set decorator, window decorator(also w/o compensation, ), film set landscape designer and painter. Giving, supportive, funny and contributes to the energy and visual look of New Orleans
MO LAPIN (HOWLPOP)
New Orleans cutting edge clothing and costume designer, deconstruction and reconstruction, recycling second hand garments into fabulous, ultra creative and out there creations. Always unbelievably affordable. Her design style is now widely copied amongst local designers. www.howlpop.com
DONALD LEWIS
Storyteller, teacher, actor, director, singer, volunteer at WRBH, stage mgr. KIDS TENT- a great inspiration and supporter of other artists. All around great guy who deserves more recognition and opportunities.
CHIEF AL MORRIS OF THE NORTHSIDE SKULL AND BONE GANG
6 t'9's Halloween Parade. He is the 6 t'9 Krewe Storm King for Life and has reigned for 5 years, but this year they could not afford bring him out for the Halloween Parade, as his situation became more complicated.
KID smART’s focus is arts integration, linking the arts with the existing academic curriculum. Their programming is designed to benefit under-resourced children in public schools in the New Orleans area, including charter schools. Arts Integration is an inquiry-based approach that lends depth to the learning process by using the arts to create new connections between content and the different ways children learn. The arts become a method in a teacher's repertoire across the curriculum. Echo Olander is the Executive Director, she manages the day-to-day logistics and directs the vision and the mission of KID smART. www.kidsmart.org
ANN MARIE POPKO
An accessory designer, New Orleans party girl, supporter of the arts, other artists, community, volunteers for arts events and brings fun and a great energy to New Orleans. http://www.annmariepopko.com/
MARK SINDLER / NEW ORLEANS PHOTO ALLIANCE
This is a true, grassroots, post-Katrina arts organization with an enormous volunteer spirit (no paid staff). They encourage the understanding and appreciation of photography through exhibitions, opportunities and educational programs. They are comprised of a diverse group of photographers who joined forces to create unity and opportunity for photographers in the Gulf South. It is an artist run organization including more than 300 members. Mark Sindler is the president of the New Orleans Photo Alliance. neworleansphotoalliance.org/
Now come to the ~
VOODOO BALLERINA KING CAKE SOIREE!!!
DECADE AT A GLANCE
created and directed by Joan Evans~
New Orleans premire includes performing artist
Chuck Perkins and his "Voices of the Big Easy"
DECADE AT A GLANCE is a physical theater work about the Great Depression. Inspired by the photographs of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, this highly visual work moves from a breadline 1929, to an unemployment line, 2009, and centers around a group of people from the Dustbowl.
DECADE AT A GLANCE is character-based theater, which uses movement, documentary text and music to help tell the story. All of the music is performed live by the 14 member physical acting ensemble, who sing depression era songs, play violin, guitar, flute, and ukulele.
Contact: Ron Lasko @ 212-505-1700 x.11
Dustbowl Drama Premieres
DECADE AT A GLANCE
February 11 - March 7 at Stella Adler Studio
Inspired by the 1930’s Dustbowl photographs of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, the Harold Clurman Center for New Works in Movement and Dance Theatre (MAD) at Stella Adler Studio will present the World Premiere of DECADE AT A GLANCE. Written and directed by Joan Evans, this blend of theatrical documentary and folk musical begins previews February 11 at Stella Adler Studio. Opening is set for February 12. In March 2010, the production will travel to New Orleans for its Louisiana Premiere at Michalopoulos Studio, produced by Artist Inc. The New Orleans production will incorperate NOLA performing artist Chuck Perkins (and others) into the ensemble. Immediately following DECADE AT A GLANCE, New Orleans, Perkins will preform a set of his poetry and music with his Avant Gaurd Circus, "Voices of the Big Easy". (Scroll down for Perkins' bio and performance information.)
DECADE AT A GLANCE is an epic story of a few families in the Dustbowl, circa 1936, who are uprooted from their farmland by drought, dust storms and mortgage foreclosure. Making the treacherous journey out west as migrant workers, these ordinary hard working people -- some with hopes dashed, and dreams deferred or dissolved -- ultimately join the union marches. Unfolding like a series of living photographs, the story, told from the point of view of a Dustbowl survivor, is related through songs, movement, and interviews preserved from the 1930’s.
The similarities and differences between the Great Depression, and our own times, are self evident when we listen to simple people tell their stories. The gestural and expressive movement evokes images of the time. The actors sing and play the violin, flute, guitar, and ukulele. The music combines Depression-era songs, union march songs from the 1930’s, and original vocal harmonies.
The cast of 15 includes Lizzi Albert, Laura Carbonell, Erika Cazeneuve, Annie Chang, Aidan Koehler, Gaja Massaro, Rafa Miguel, Tommy Nelms, Sean Powell, Lulu Rossbacher, Melanie Siegel, Margaux Susi, Elise Toscano, Cynthia Vazquez, and Sarah Wharton with lighting
by Brian Tovar, costumes by Katja Andreiev and stage managers Emily Ciotti and Breanna Stroud, and Chuck Perkins and other New Orleans performers for the NOLA premire.
Joan Evans has been creating and performing original physical theatre work since 1975. She won a Fringe First Award at the 1996 Edinburgh Fringe Festival for creating, directing, and choreographing the ensemble piece Where Ravens Rule, a theatrical response to the war in
Bosnia. She has toured her solo work in Austria, Brazil, and Germany. She has performed her work at such theatres as the Performing Garage and Manhattan Class Company in NYC, and the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center In Connecticut. She has been the recipient of four National Endowment for the Arts Theatre Grants. She was awarded a 1993, Citation of Excellence from the Union Internationale de la Marionnette (UNIMA) for her work combining dance, acting, and puppetry in Rico and Dolores. She has taught and directed at Stella Adler for two decades.
DECADE AT A GLANCE runs February 11 - March 7. Schedule varies. All performances are at 7:30pm. Running time is 65 minutes. Stella Adler Studio is located at 31 West 27th Street, between Broadway and 6th Avenue -- accessible from the N/R train at 28th Street or the F train at 23rd Street.
Tickets are $18, available at www.TheaterMania.com or 212-352-3101.
CHUCK PERKINS
is a favorite performer in New Orleans where he returned in 2002, and in Chicago where he lived for ten years. Chuck has preformed with former Poet Laureate Mark Strand. He has also preformed with Mark Smith creator of the Poetry Slam, and Umar Bin Hassan of The Last Poets. He has headlined at the Guild Complex in Chicago, with his most notable show in tribute to Gil Scott Heron. In early 2009 Chuck performed to a sell out crowd at New York’s Bowery Poetry Club backed by Antoine Drye, Donald Edwards, Kevin Ferrell, Leslie Harrison and Brian Lynch. He has also been featured in poetry venues, high schools, and colleges around the country. His poetry appears in the best selling anthology Spoken Word Revolution. Chuck has performed with many of New Orleans top musicians, including Donald Harrison, Henry Butler, Bill Summers, Nicholas Payton, Herlin Riley, Glen David Andrews, Dave Torkanowsky, and Shannon Powell to name a few. Chuck was featured in the French documentary N. O. Ballade, as well as two upcoming documentaries, Endangered Species and Tradition is a Temple. He created his Avante Guard Circus "Voices of the Big Easy" in 2004. It’s a broad panorama of New Orleans' rich musical and literary culture, fusing performances that are alternately passionate and whimsical, poignant and fun. The Voices of the Big Easy crew consist of, Chuck Perkins on words, Troy Sawyer on trumpet, Jesse Morrow on Bass, Julian Addison on drums, Wildman Ivory Holmes on congas, and Mardi Gras Indian Spy Boy Honey. Voices have performed in some of New Orleans' best musical venues: the Dragon's Den, Donna's, the Maple Leaf, Snug Harbor, Chickie Wah Wah, the Blue Nile and Bacchanal. A Love Song For Nola is Chuck’s follow up CD to A Bucket of Questions. Love Song was selected by the Times Picayune’s music critic Keith Spera as being one of the best CD releases of 2008. Voices’ had its first international performance at the Banlieues Bleues Blues festival of Paris in February of 2009. Chuck ended 2009 with performances in Manchester and Liverpool.
PERKINS REVIEWED
Turn on the TV, pick up a paper or bury yourself in blogs if you want. The real news from New Orleans comes from guys like Chuck Perkins — sometimes over a cup of coffee at Rose Nicaud but best of all rapped, chanted and sung to beats of African drums, with a trumpet or tambourine or such as color commentator. Voices of the Big easy honors ancestors, skewers presidents and mayors, nods to neighbors, and never lies: You can't make this stuff up, anyway. Chuck wouldn't want to. Swung in rhythm, his prose packs the wallop of truth.
-Larry Blumenfeld, editor-at-large Jazziz magazine
It is said that New Orleans holds more raw talent than any other city… Chuck Perkins is certainly one of them! He began making his voice heard by tearing off the straitjacket of anthology poetry and verbalizing what was happening in him and around him, in the great African-American tradition of Watts Prophets, the Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron… To uncover the psyche of the city, he draws together a prodigious assembly of strengths and presences: jazz, blues, Indian Mardi Gras funk… Crucial!
Nouveau Paris Ile-de-France’s Banlieues Bleues selection of the week.
A voice of rage and reason, memory and melody, Chuck Perkins is a distinct element on the New Orleans literary performance scene.
Chris Rose, Times Picayune
Perkins brings his urgency, fluency, intelligence, street smarts and sense of drama as well as humor to his new cd “ A Love Song for Nola”. Perkins knows his subjects well. He’s not looking in from the outside but speaking from within the warmth and eccentricities of the New Orleans music community.
Geraldine Wyckoff, Louisiana Weekly
To spend an evening with Chuck Perkins and Voices of the Big Easy is to experience the uniqueness of what New Orleans offers. Perkins is known as a poet or spoken word performer. He has taken poetry slam to a new level.
Anita Oubre, New Orleans Tribune
Keith Spera voted “ A Love Song for Nola” one of the best New Orleans cd releases of 2008.
Keith Spera, music critic Times Picayune
Chuck Perkins Performing Live:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Greta Turken writes:
Look, we're all a little depressed these days, right? A show about the Dustbowl part of the Great Depression could be what you need. Why? Maybe because it's the Dustbowl. A change of scenery, a picker upper: "Decade at a Glance" by Joan Evans. If there is such a thing as feeling better about the economic train wreck we're in, and all that got us here, this piece takes you there. Not better as in good. Not at all. Better as in fire in the belly, as in connected to something larger. Not larger as in good - larger as in humanity, history coming back around. Better as in recognition, as in disgust and awe, and needing to act.
Creator, choreographer, director Joan Evans slips a company of wonderful young actors behind the haunted eyes, gnarled hands and dust streaked children's faces familiar from the photos of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. These eyes of Dustbowlers gaze out at us, and a group of people like us but different comes to life. They tell us what happened with all they've got: their voices, their songs, the instruments they carry, the movements in concert that make up their days, words they spoke then for us to hear now.
Decade at a Glance sets indelible camera images into motion free of a set, with an ensemble of bodies tuned like waving wheat. The tribal glue that held migrant groups together is matched in this ensemble's high wire finesse. The thrift it took for the Dustbowlers to survive is met in the spare elegance of Evans's vision. In a world of pleasures kissed goodbye, music is indispensable as food and air - or how could they play like that? You'll get charming spoken musical duos, solo arias and harmonies that bring tears to your eyes. Plus, the solemnest hoedown and meanest banker you'll ever see together in one place. The group's means of transportation is ingenious, then sorry, then blackly hilarious. Evans wrings humor from a brutal life. Great beauty happens before you - and none of it is pretty. True as it was for the Dustbowl families, there's no place here for fuss. This brings us to the feat of acting: delivered without sympathy - rarely seen, pure gesture with nothing extra, words spoken as plainly as their speakers would have spoken them, enough to turn a watcher's heart inside out and give chills up the spine - unbelievably hard to do, yet achieved under the consummate direction of Joan Evans.
Come see it. You'll feel better about everything.
